Obama's policy initiatives remain unwelcome and are proving more costly and less effective than billed. Obama's leadership style, or lack thereof, even when his party controlled government, has fallen short in terms of accomplishments measured against promises.
Obama lost the first debate so now he and his advisers will return to their previous effort to define Romney through character assassination and outright lies. This is an act of desperation and will prove a mistake but, in their eyes, they have no better option than taking the low road Chicago style.
I have said all along Obama will be beaten by his own words and actions. Though Romney has not run the most accomplished campaign I stick to my belief: Romney wins hands down!
Jeff Clark disagrees and sees Obama winning! (See 1 below.)
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My friend of many years and one of my most faithful memo readers, Bernie Marcus, is recovering from a six artery open heart operation. Bernie had planned on a thirty city tour but had to alter his plans. That said, Bernie at 84, fears what is happening to our nation, the direction Obama's hope and change has taken us and Bernie cannot sit still.
I had the pleasure of introducing Bernie here in February and told the audience, in my view, Bernie is the Jewish equivalent of Paul Revere. Bernie is the epitome of what America is all about. After being fired from his job be and several partners revolutionized retailing with their big box concept and The Home Depot Story is now history.
Bernie is the real article and yes, what he accomplished he did himself notwithstanding Obama's nonsense about you did not create that business blah, blah, blah.
Go Bernie Marcus!(See 2 below.)
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Sent to me by a friend, a fellow memo reader and director of a major Jewish organization. (See 3 below.)
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Caroline Glick writes about the Left's only enemy! (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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| The results are in… Mitt Romney won the first debate. He performed so well, in fact, his chances of winning the main event jumped by 30%. That's good news for Romney supporters. But President Obama's odds of victory are still 66%… I didn't get these numbers from a polling service. Nor did they come from the political analysts at FOX News, CNN, or any of the major television networks. These numbers came from Intrade – the world's leading prediction market. A prediction market works like a stock market. But instead of buyers and sellers coming together to determine the appropriate price of a stock, Intrade customers help determine the probability of something happening. Traders can make predictions on business events. They can trade on climate and weather. They can predict entertainment news… like if the new Tim Burton movie Frankenweenie will gross more than $20 million during its opening weekend (currently an even-money bet). And of course, they can make predictions on the presidential election. Prior to Wednesday night's debate, traders at Intrade were giving Obama a 74% chance at reelection. Romney's chances to become leader of the free world were just 26%. Following the debate, though, those numbers changed to 66% versus 34% in favor of Obama. According to the clients of Intrade, Romney clearly won the debate… but Obama is still going to win the election. You can scoff at those numbers if you like. But lots of folks on Wall Street pay close attention to what's going on in prediction markets like Intrade. These markets are more than just a source of entertainment. They help traders determine the probability of events as mundane as whether the Dow Jones Industrial Average will close up or down on any given day or which actor will win an Academy Award… to more important items like which country will be the first to drop out of the European Union. And of course, they help traders determine who is most likely to be president. You can check it out at www.intrade.com. Best regards and good trading, Jeff Clark ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2)Home Depot Founder Bernie Marcus Featured in New RJC TV Ad |
Washington, D.C. (October 5, 2012) -- The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) has released the next in its series of television ads. The new ad features a conversation with Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus.
Bernie Marcus is one of the country's great success stories, the son of immigrants who became a major leader and philanthropist in the Jewish community, and a supporter of programs and institutions, from medical services and research to the Georgia Aquarium, that enhance the lives of children and families across the United States.
In the RJC ad, Bernie has an important message for the Jewish community and for the country. Bernie shares his concerns for our nation and how frightened he is by what Pres. Obama's policies mean for America, especially for our children and future generations. In particular, the lack of job creation and rising home foreclosures are limiting the American dream for millions of families.
As someone who has taken Home Depot from one store to one of the largest companies in the world, and as someone who has hired millions of people over many years in business, Bernie is in a unique position to know which policies can bring about economic growth and prosperity and how badly Pres. Obama's policies are hurting us.
The 60-second ad, part of the RJC's $6.5 million campaign, is airing on broadcast and cable television in Florida, Ohio, Nevada and Pennsylvania. A longer, 3-minute web version can be seen on the RJC web site and on YouTube.
Bernie Marcus is one of the country's great success stories, the son of immigrants who became a major leader and philanthropist in the Jewish community, and a supporter of programs and institutions, from medical services and research to the Georgia Aquarium, that enhance the lives of children and families across the United States.
In the RJC ad, Bernie has an important message for the Jewish community and for the country. Bernie shares his concerns for our nation and how frightened he is by what Pres. Obama's policies mean for America, especially for our children and future generations. In particular, the lack of job creation and rising home foreclosures are limiting the American dream for millions of families.
As someone who has taken Home Depot from one store to one of the largest companies in the world, and as someone who has hired millions of people over many years in business, Bernie is in a unique position to know which policies can bring about economic growth and prosperity and how badly Pres. Obama's policies are hurting us.
The 60-second ad, part of the RJC's $6.5 million campaign, is airing on broadcast and cable television in Florida, Ohio, Nevada and Pennsylvania. A longer, 3-minute web version can be seen on the RJC web site and on YouTube.
Click here or on the image below to see the TV ad:
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Strategies of denial in progressive-left Jewish discourse
Perhaps the most astonishing fact about the current political moment is the chilling indifference of progressive-left Jews to the anti-Jewish/anti-Israel behavior of the Obama administration. As an American apostate from the political left, due, at least in part, to Barack Obama’s veiled hostility to the State of Israel, I am constantly amazed at the strategies of denial in progressive-left Jewish discourse. In order to put a happy face on the Obama administration, and thereby keep Jewish American voters in line, various rhetorical strategies are employed. These include, but are not limited to, ignoring obvious truths, denying obvious truths, minimizing obvious truths, diffusion of responsibility, and the lowest of all, defamation of character.
Obama wrecked whatever potential there may have been in the peace process and then blamed the Israelis for his own failure. He ushered the Muslim Brotherhood into power in Egypt and then said, in effect, “Oh, well. Egypt is no longer an ally. Not an enemy, really, but not an ally.” Obama is perfectly fine with the idea of a Judenrein state of Palestine and feels that he has the right to tell Jewish people where we may, or may not, be allowed to live, and thus build, in both Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.
These truths are obvious and entirely ignored among “progressive Zionists” in the United States.
The very first tactic that is used on the Jewish left to protect Obama is simply to ignore inconvenient facts. It is unfathomable that American Jews would vote for an American presidential candidate who believes, in the manner of some 14th century Italian potentate, that he has the right to dictate where Jews can live. The reason that so many American Jews will vote for Obama is because they simply ignore very significant and obvious and inconvenient truths.
I feel considerable sympathy for Jews on the left who favor Israel, because they are spit on daily by their anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic “friends” within their own political movement — and I say this as someone who comes out of that movement. The progressive left has become a hotbed of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, and Jews who choose to participate in such venues are subject to perpetual harassment. They are constantly called out for supporting the allegedly racist, colonialist, imperialist, militarist, apartheid — and did I mention racist? — state of Israel, and yet, they mainly remain loyal foot-soldiers to the very political movement that acts in opposition to Jewish well-being.When “progressive Zionists” cannot ignore obvbecause people like me point them out, they often simply deny obvious truths. This is a very common strategy within Jewish-left discourse when it comes to any number of things including, for example, the fact that the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction (BDS) the State of Israel is a sub-political movement derived from the progressive-left itself.
What I have sometimes found is that when called upon to explain just why they continue to support a political movement that has no interest in supporting the Jewish people, they simply deny the obvious truth.
I have been told by exceedingly intelligent Jewish people on the progressive left who follow the Arab-Israel conflict that BDS is not a movement of the left.
The claim is laughable on its face, and yet, progressive-left Jews will make that claim in order to spare themselves embarrassment.
A slightly more sophisticated tactic is to simply minimize obvious truths. When confronted with the obvious fact that BDS and anti-Semitic anti-Zionism is, in the West, mainly a product of the progressive-left, the tendency is to minimize. Jewish progressives will tell us that it’s only a fringe of the fringe that are anti-Zionist. A few people on a few websites are nothing to be concerned about, we are assured. Yet the truth of the matter is that anti-Israel bias is rife throughout the Western academe and media. The problem is not a matter of a few fringe websites, nor even major progressive-left websites that peddle anti-Zionist hatred, such as Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, or the Guardian, but also universities such as Yale that cancelled the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism(YIISA) or Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, which both recently hosted anti-Zionist conferences
Thus, progressive-left Jewish apologists endanger world Jewry by pretending a clear and present danger is nothing to really be concerned about.
This is diffusion of responsibility. The claim suggests that even if Obama did demand “total settlement freeze,” such a demand is fully in keeping with American foreign policy going back many presidential tenures. Of course, what it overlooks is the fact that it was the Obama administration that made “total settlement freeze” a prerequisite for negotiations with the Palestinians. It was Obama, and no one else, who pulled the rug out from under negotiations before they even began.This one tends to be used when criticizing Obama’s dysfunctional relationship with the Jewish State of Israel. Obama wrecked whatever potential there may have been in the peace process by demanding “total settlement freeze” even in areas of Jerusalem which, it was widely acknowledged, would remain part of Israel in any future agreement, such as Ramat Shlomo. What I am often told when this issue is raised is that Obama’s policy on the “settlements” is no different from that of his predecessors. George W. Bush, they will say, also opposed Israeli construction in the “West Bank,” as did Bill Clinton.And then one day, while listening to anti-war speakers in Civic Center San Francisco, I looked up and saw a banner with a Nazi swastika entwined in a Star of David. It was then that I finally realized that the progressive movement held a poison at its core.
Now this one is my all-time favorite. As any religious defector can tell you, there is nothing that brings out the malice like religious apostasy. And just as this holds true for many religious people, it is most certainly true for very many political people, as well. For many years I was part of the American left, and I still hold to many “progressive” political positions. I favor a woman’s right to choose an abortion and I do not care if 37 of my gay neighbors all decide to marry one another, so long as they invite me to the barbecue. I opposed the war in Afghanistan, and particularly in Iraq, and marched against them perpetually throughout the Bush years.
I have not been to an anti-war rally since.
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The Left's only enemy By Caroline Glick
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's legal term in office expired nearly four years ago. But his supporters don't care. In Israel, Washington and throughout the world, Abbas's supporters extol the authoritarian leader as a great moderate. In 2002, desperately searching for a face for the Palestinians that wasn't Yasser Arafat's face, the Left pushed Abbas out from behind Arafat's shadow. Abbas, who served as Arafat's deputy for 39 years, was upheld as a great moderate and placed in the invented position of Palestinian prime minister.
The fact that Abbas was an inveterate Jew-hater who spent four decades in the senior leadership of a terrorist organization and whose doctoral dissertation was a long denial of the Holocaust, was brushed aside.
His leftist supporters don't care that he says Israel has no right to exist. They are untroubled by his 2008 rejection of then-prime minister Ehud Olmert's unprecedentedly generous offer of peace and Palestinian statehood. They don't mind that Abbas has refused to negotiate peace with Israel for the past four years. They don't care that he has signed two unity government deals with Hamas or that he seeks to gain sovereignty for a Palestinian state through the UN and so establish a Palestinian state in a formal state of war with Israel.
They don't care. But most Israelis do. Due to their recognition of his hatred for Israel and due to the terrorism Abbas has condoned and financed for decades, the vast majority of Israelis do not consider him a potential partner for peace. They do not believe that either Abbas or the Palestinians as a whole are remotely interested in being appeased by Israel.
As a consequence, most Israelis greeted Abbas's speech at the UN General Assembly last week with indifference. In that speech, Abbas made clear - yet again - that he remains Arafat's loyal deputy. The majority of Abbas's speech involved a litany of libels against Israel, which he accused of everything from terrorism to apartheid, colonialism, racism, murder, theft, etc., etc., etc.
Then he moved on to his demands. In addition to reinstating his demand that Israel agree to every Palestinian demand as a precondition for negotiations, Abbas demanded that Israel release all Palestinian terrorists from its prisons.
No, none of Abbas's attacks had an iota of truth to them.
But who cares? Abbas certainly doesn't. And neither do his supporters. Their support for Abbas has nothing to do with what he says or does. It has to do with who they are and what they want. Abbas is their prop, not their partner.
Abbas's Israeli supporters are the core of far-leftists who brought us the phony peace process with the PLO. Two thousand dead Israelis later, and with no peace in sight, their camp is much smaller today than it was in 1993. But it is still dedicated. And it is overpopulated by members of the media.
TIPPING HIS hat to this group, this week Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced in a media interview that he thinks that Israel should unilaterally withdraw from much of Judea and Samaria.
For most Israelis, Barak's plan is self-evidently insane.
We left Gaza and see the consequences of that unilateral withdrawal every day as southern Israel is bombarded with missiles and rockets. We left and Gaza was transformed into a hub for global jihad, increasingly indistinguishable from Sinai. The very notion that our defense chief could suggest adopting an identical strategy for Judea and Samaria is both obscene and frightening.
What can he be thinking? Barak is thinking about elections, which are apparently about to be called. Barak thinks his best bet politically is to try to win the support of Abbas's ever shrinking support base.
Barak lost his political base when he left the Labor Party and formed his own Independence faction with other breakaway Labor politicians at the beginning of 2011. He needs Abbas's Israeli supporters to vote for him if he is to get elected to the next Knesset. Even more crucially, Barak needs Abbas's supporters in the Israeli media. So to win their support, he opted to run on a platform of expelling Jews from their homes.
Barak's move doesn't tell us anything we don't already know about him. He remains the political opportunist he has always been. His move is interesting because of what it reveals about the nature of Israel's Left.
There is no rational way to argue that Israel can gain any advantage by surrendering Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians. If Israel departs, either Abbas will gobble up the territory and demand more, or he will swallow the concession and get swallowed by Hamas, which will demand more - as happened in Gaza.
Either way, Israel loses.
But that doesn't matter for the Left. The Left continues to support Israeli withdrawals because its members know that the biggest loser of such an action won't be Israel as a whole. It will be the Israeli Right. And that is all the Left cares about.
The only enemy they are interested in fighting, the only adversary they wish to defeat, is their fellow Israelis. And in a bid to win their support at the ballot box - and on the evening news - Barak has decided to embrace their cause. He will fight their fight against their Israeli enemies for them.
The Israeli Left is not alone in its belief that its number one priority is to destroy its domestic political opposition. Throughout the Western world, the political Left is increasingly rallying around positions that are in fundamental conflict with their nation's interests as well as with the specific ideological commitments of the Left, for the sole purpose of gaining and maintaining power.
In recent weeks, the Left in the US has exposed its motivations and purpose in profoundly troubling ways. If Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel is the core of the Zionist revolution, freedom of speech is the foundation of America. Without Jewish settlement, there is no Israel. Without freedom of speech, there is no America.
IN RECENT weeks, US President Barack Obama and all of his senior aides and supporters have launched an assault on freedom of speech. They have attacked previously unknown figures because they dared to exercise their freedom of speech to produce an anti-Islamic film and broadcast it on YouTube. The White House pressured Google (which owns YouTube) to take the movie down. Obama's media supporters have gone along with this shocking assault on bedrock American principles.
The Left's support for Obama's bid to repress freedom of speech in relation to the movie was not an isolated incident. Today the enlightened leftists of New York and Washington are apoplectic because a federal judge required New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority to post paid advertisements by the Stop the Islamization of America human rights group calling for Americans to support Israel against jihad.
The content of the ads is self-evidently reasonable. They read, "In any war between the savage and the civilized man, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."
SIOA's founder Pamela Geller submitted the ads to the MTA last year in response to a rash of anti- Israel ads calling for the US to end its support for the Jewish state. Those ads were published on New York buses and subways and on public transportation around the US.
The MTA rejected SIOA's ad but the group sued. Citing the US Constitution, the court required the MTA to post them. When after a year's delay the ads were finally posted last week, the US Left in the media and beyond had a collective fit.
From The New York Times to radical rabbis to pro- Islamic Christian pastors to The Washington Post, everyone is wringing their hands. In a televised debate with Geller, the anti-Israel evangelical pastor Rev. Jim Wallis condemned the ads, told Geller she was going to get Christians killed, (by what or whom, he never said), and demanded that Geller silence herself. As he put it, "Stop talking."
It is important to be clear. The American Left doesn't have a problem with free speech, per se. And they aren't concerned - as Wallis would have you believe - that calling jihad savagery is going to get people killed, (by not-at-all savage jihadists).
The problem with messages like Geller's is that talk about jihad distracts people from what the Left wants them to be thinking about.
Like the Israeli Left, the American Left doesn't want Americans to think about the actual threats to the US emanating from the Islamic world. They want the public to think about what for them is the only real threat to their values and their ability to win and wield power.
That threat doesn't emanate from the Islamic world where women are treated worse than farm animals, homosexuals are hanged in public squares, Christians are forcibly converted and assaulted, churches are burned to the ground, the annihilation of the Jewish people throughout the world is an ardent desire, and "Death to America" is a political program.
For the American Left, the primary threat to their way of life comes from people who oppose abortions and gay marriage and gun control. It comes from people who oppose unionization of government workers and nationalization of healthcare.
And it comes from people like Geller who state the obvious about jihad.
The reason that Islam is supposed to be immune from criticism is that for American leftists as for Israeli leftists, the only important battle is the one against domestic foes. And just as the abysmal results of leftist policies have left the Israeli Left with no choice but to shoot the messengers, so too the American Left must deal with policy failure by silencing the opposition.
In Israel, leftist appeasement of Palestinian terrorists has led to a horrific death toll and the obvious absence of peace. So the Left must silence those who have the temerity to oppose that failed policy. The Right's most visible members are the religious Zionists, who are disproportionately situated beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and so the Left must destroy them through expulsions, no matter what the cost to Israel.
In America, the Left's most conspicuous failure is its claim to promote women's rights, equality and civil liberties in the culture war, even as it defends the Islamic world's addiction to female genital mutilation, forced marriages, honor killings and executions of homosexuals for the "crime" of being gay. So the Left must silence critics of jihad and Islamism, and hope no one will notice its hypocrisy.
The upshot of all of this is that the Left must be denied its ability to dominate national discourses. Because Abbas and the pathologically Jew-hating society he leads is a threat to the Jewish state, while religious Zionists are not. And the assaults on American embassies throughout the Islamic world are not due to Internet movies, but to the savagery inherent in jihadist Islam.
In these perilous times we cannot permit ourselves to be led astray by those who insist we are our worst enemies.
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